Sunday, February 21, 2016

An Example of Moral Courage: Alyssa Peterson (1976-2003)

In September 2003, a 27-year-old female soldier, a Mormon, US Army
Specialist Alyssa Peterson, an Arabic linguist with the 101st Airborne
Division at Tal Afar base, refused to apply the interrogation techniques
that had been authorized for use on Iraqi prisoners.

Alyssa Peterson refused to take part in interrogations in the "cage"
where Iraqis were stripped naked in front of female soldiers who mocked
them and were burned with cigarettes, among other things that don't need
to be mentioned. Do you blame her for refusing to participate in
actions like these?

Three days after her refusal to be involved in torture, on September 15,
2003, Peterson was found dead of a gunshot wound at Tal Afar base. Keep
in mind, her suicide occurred 7 months before the Abu Ghraib tortures
were exposed to the world. Seven months before millions of people saw
what she saw. Seven months before we learned about the horrendous actions that she steadfastly refused to be part of.

The Army's official cause of her death, which is all that her family was
told, was death from a "non-hostile weapons discharge." The suicide and
the report of the Army's internal investigation was uncovered by KNAU
(Flagstaff, AZ) public radio reporter Kevin Elston. The public didn't
find out the truth until Elston's broadcast in November 2005, three
years after Alyssa Peterson's suicide. Without Elston's
tenacious pursuit of the truth; it is likely no one would ever have
found out what really happened. You can read a transcript of Elston's
broadcast here.

The Army, after having first tried to cover up the truth, has since classified her death as suicide.

From the investigation of her death:

"We told her that you have to be able to turn on and off the
interrogation mode – that you act differently towards the people we
meet with outside of the detainee facility," one fellow soldier stated.
She said that she did not know how to be two people; Alyssa could not
be one person in the cage and another outside the wire."

Sometimes being a hero or heroine is a simple act of refusing to abandon
one's humanity when all around have forsaken their own. Most
Americans silently hope they're never forced to make that choice because
I believe, deep down, they know they won't make the right one.

I'm not saying that suicide was the right choice for Alyssa Peterson;
but when she was faced with a choice between loyalty to a country and
loyalty to her own principles, I do think she absolutely made the
correct choice, and the courageous choice. She chose her own death
rather than abandoning her humanity. I think she should've chosen,
instead, to desert from the military or even to defect from her country,
and to go public with her knowledge. And she may have done that, if
more of us (in the summer of 2003) had been ready to listen, and to
support her in that decision. Maybe she would have if her family and
friends hadn't been urging her to risk her life in a senseless war that
they weren't willing, able, or courageous enough to fight in themselves.
Maybe she would have if most of the nation hadn't been such shameless
cheerleaders for a war based on a framework of outrageous lies. Maybe she would have, if more of us had been stronger and more courageous.

It's up to us now to act bravely. It's up to us to demand that our government tell us the truth.